OB Rag

It was the busiest lot in all Ocean Beach this morning – August 21st – at 7:30 on the 4700 block of Santa Monica Avenue – across from OB Elementary. Church volunteers, homeless people, and community activists were gathering for an early morning breakfast and scheduled alley clean-up. Patty and I arrived at that moment, half asleep but ready with our work clothes.

A while later and by time breakfast was served – a regular thing every Saturday morning at this site – a hundred people had gathered. Some guys were singing and playing a guitar, med students from UCSD were taking blood pressures, and houseless people were collecting food, soaps, and other personal hygiene items handed to them by a half dozen good-natured souls who had arrived early and stood behind tables.

Originally posted August 6, 2010
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ALLEY CLEAN-UP ORGANIZED – August 21

The folks that organized the first Community Forum on homelessness in Ocean Beach have come out with their report on that open forum which was held on July 6th, and have called for a second forum for August 24th. It will be held at the First Baptist Church of Ocean Beach, located at 4790 Santa Monica Avenue at 7pm

by Michael Steinberg / IndyBay.org / Aug 21st, 2010

SUMMARY: Five people were arrested Friday for locking down in an entrance and exit to an Arco/BP gas station at the corner of Fell and Divisadero in San Francisco. The protesters called their action a “bike spill.” They chained themselves to bicycles and laid in the car entrance and exit ways, effectively shutting down the gas station.

Our local Repubnick, Darrel Issa – of North County – is in the news again, and he’s in the news again because he continues to play the role of the GOP’s attack dog on the Obama administration. Of all the problems facing this country, what do you think Issa is now charging the White House with?

Issa, the ranking Republican on the House of Representatives’ Oversight Committee, is charging Obama with being guilty of using propaganda with White House claims of saving jobs and creating new ones with stimulus monies. That’s it. Obama is therefore guilty because the claims cannot be proven, says Issa, and such propaganda is prohibited if taxpayer money is used.

by Ariana Huffington / Huffington Post / August 21, 2010

As we head into the stretch run of the 2010 midterms, and get closer to the halfway point of President Obama’s first term, we’re hearing a lot of media chatter about the “enthusiasm gap” plaguing Democrats. There is also a lot of talk about whether progressives — aka “the professional left” — should or shouldn’t be disappointed in Obama. In a post about last month’s Netroots Nation gathering in Las Vegas, Matt Yglesias wrote that at this year’s event, “the dominant mood” was “depressed” and that he could feel a “considerable degree of ill will toward Barack Obama and his administration.”

Terriers is a show about two private investigators who are tenacious, just like the terrier dogs.

In the series Terriers, Michael Raymond-James plays Britt Pollack and Donal Logue plays Hank Dolworth, two men with questionable pasts who join together to form their own private investigation team. On August 3, 2010 the two gentlemen along with the producers discussed their new series with members of the Television Critics Association.

Originally posted on Aug. 20, 2010.

by Annie Lane / August 20, 2010

Meet Jacob Magness, a native San Diegan who’s spent the last 13 years saving lives in Ocean Beach.
As one of OB’s permanent lifeguards, Magness, 32, is no stranger to the ocean or making rescues. In fact, he’s been in or near the water for the last 24 years.

Editor: There’s a new ‘bad boy’ in town, and he’s not a bum or a homeless person. He … or she … is the person who grabs free electricity from the Newport Avenue light poles. The “new” U-T (Union-Tribune) felt this story still had legs and quotes our own Denny Knox, CEO of the OB Mainstreet Assoc., and Jim Musgrove, head of the OB Town Council. Go to it.
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City street crews are looking to curb the number of people in Ocean Beach who siphon electricity from outlets on street lamps to power everything from cell phones to recreational vehicles.

The San Diego Streets Division is awaiting another shipment of tamper-proof utility covers that restrict access to electrical sockets on a three-block stretch of Newport Avenue ….

By Rocky Neptun

“Mommie, I’m hungry,” the little girl cried as she stood shivering in the cold wind, waiting for food. The image has never left me…and now that I am semi-retired I want to be part of an effort making sure no more children starve on San Diego city streets.

I want to help buy a catering truck. A fellow member of the San Diego Renters Union, who was once homeless, has gotten a modest settlement and has agreed to match whatever the Renters Union can raise toward buying a food truck to feed the homeless. As someone who spent their teen years on the streets of New York City, I learned very early, as I camped under a hedge at New York University, that whatever didn’t fit in a back-pack was useless. I had no possessions, so possessions did not possess me. But I did know hunger and, often, what crimes against society – and oneself – it took to obtain money for food.

Don’t believe what you’ve never been told. The water has never, ever been this cold. (Future rant coming here soon…….

Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming – A book review

Having escaped high school by my junior year, passing the California High School Equivalency exam, continuing on to the community college system and gaining enough technical education to get a decent job, I never got much of an education in history or government.

I worked for a company that was owned by a fairly progressive thinking family, manufacturing goods used mainly by environmental agencies and educational institutions. It was gratifying work and allowed me to care for my family in a simple fashion, we didn’t want for much, but we didn’t want much either. I went about my daily life pretty isolated from the issues that affect so many, I had a job, we had health insurance and until that company closed I didn’t really understand how good we had it.

By Chalmers Johnson / Tom Dispatch / August 17, 2010

In 1962, the historian Barbara Tuchman published a book about the start of World War I and called it The Guns of August. It went on to win a Pulitzer Prize. She was, of course, looking back at events that had occurred almost 50 years earlier and had at her disposal documents and information not available to participants. They were acting, as Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara put it, in the fog of war.

So where are we this August of 2010, with guns blazing in one war in Afghanistan even as we try to extricate ourselves from another in Iraq?